Wayne Mayor Susan Rowe said her city's seen it the hardest in the last nine years since the recession hit. So hard, that the foreclosure rate in the 6-square-mile city was at 40 percent in the town, with tax revenues seeing significant decline.

"I don't think we'll ever get to the rates we were at in 2008-2009," she said. "We have people that lost everything. Lost their pensions, lost their health care. All they can do is pay taxes, and often, they can't even do that."

Rowe shared what's taking place in Wayne during a forum held by the League of Women Voters of Northwest Wayne County held Thursday evening in the Robert and Janet Bennett Library in Livonia to discuss revenue sharing and local government funding. The discussion featured Rowe, Van Buren Township Trustee Sherry Frazier and Wayne County Commissioner Glenn Anderson, who represents Inkster, Garden City and part of Westland.

Rowe discussed the biggest challenges facing her city, which include the need to keep services running but saw drastic reductions in the taxes being brought in.

"In 2008, our taxable value citywide was $607 million. It has now dropped to $350 million," she said. "But we still have to keep lights on. We still have to maintain 79 miles of roads in our community. We still have to have fire. We still have to have police. We still have to have our trash picked up. All we can do is cut people there."

Frazier said possibly trying to regionalize services moving forward may be the thing needed to keep governments afloat, especially since there are so many smaller communities that still maintain many of the same services that larger communities around them do.

She talked about the size difference between Van Buren Township and the City of Belleville, which each maintain separate, similar services. In some cases, more residences in Van Buren Township support currently-shared services such as a library, but everyone in Van Buren Township, Belleville and nearby Sumpter Township utilize them.

"I think we have to get into this sharing mode and combine our resources, or we'll all be out of luck," she said.

Several of the panelists also discussed the effect of several taxing laws, including Proposal A and the Headlee Amendment, approved by voters in 1978.

Headlee, among other aspects, prevents significant increases in taxes on property if values increase rapidly. That means while taxes drop in accordance with property values, they cannot go up proportionally if the property values goes up.

Anderson, a former state legislator, said Headlee is something he'd like to see revisited given the effect its had in recent years. He said there has to be a way to find a balance to not overtaxing residents but still being able to fund services.

"If we do change, we have to find some way to find that balance that our seniors are not taxed so much that they can't stay in their homes and have to sell their homes," he said. "There's got to be some adjustment to it."